For the past several months I’ve had various problems with my Playstation 3. On a regular basis it would show corrupt file and disk warnings and then spend several minutes restoring the file system. I’ve tried formatting the drive but while downloading updates or trying to launch or play a game it would freeze. I followed several suggestions from various forums that recommended using the built-in recovery tools for the PS3.

Finally, I decided to put the original hard drive in it and remove the 250 GB drive I had installed. The original drive has worked perfectly since. The larger drive passed one scan test using a third-party program but showed a bad sector after scanning it with chkdsk in Windows 7. For now I’m just going to leave the original drive installed – I use the PS3 so infrequently these days I’m not sure if I’ll need a larger drive anyway.

Updated 07/12/2011: Based on my experience I’m left to conclude that either the PS3 file system is not capable of marking bad sectors and ignoring them, or the implementation is very poor. Essentially, this may mean that it doesn’t matter whether or not you run chkdsk in Windows. When the drive is re-inserted it will be formatted by the PS3. Since the marking of bad sectors appears to be a file system task then the information collected in Windows (or another OS using similar utilities) may simply be lost or ignored and the PS3 will continue to access the bad sector.

The 250 GB drive I was using only had one sector detected as bad, but it was enough to cause numerous problems when installed in the PS3.